Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Gary,

You'll want to verify Pinterest just as the instructions say.  Google doesn't actually use the Pinterest verification for anything - verifying just allows you to link to your domain from your Pinterest profile - google's gonna crawl and index it either way.
So google will know the link is there, but honestly, don't count on social profile links like this making much of a difference for SEO.  However, if you're active and connected on that network, pinterest can sure drive some referral traffic to your site. Hope that helps!

Yea you want to run a "self-hosted wordpress" to get the real SEO value out of it.  It's totally different than wordpress.com

http://wpmu.org/wordpress-org-vs-wordpress-com/

The benefit of wordpress is you won't have to be programmer to fix duplicate url issues and a lot of the technical stuff.  It's not that a wordpress site "ranks better" or something...it's just easier to keep technical issues from holding you back in my opinion.

You don't have to set up wordpress on a subdomain.  And I probably wouldn't unless you're just looking to add a blog to your an existing site.

My opinion is that wordpress is hands down the most SEO-friendly CMS out there, and much less time-consuming to optimize than anything else.  You can create clean permalinks in 2 clicks, it basically handles the .htaccess stuff for you.  Also, the wordpress SEO plugin from Yoast makes it real easy optimize.

There was a good Wordpress SEO mozinar the other day that you might find helpful also.

http://moz.com/webinars/hands-on-answers-to-the-most-asked-wordpress-qestions

Hi Larry,

I don't think you'll find any "plugins" on Moz.  This site is one helluva of a bootstrap based custom solution.

But if you're looking for a nice social plugin for wordpress - I like simple social icons.

Yea it definitely depends on crawl rates.  Usually a couple weeks or less, as long as the site's not brand new and has a few incoming links already.

But just to clarify...you're saying that the new URL isn't appearing in search results yet, right?  Not that the link in Google literally isn't redirecting to the new URL.

...because if it's not redirecting yet, something's wrong- check that you 301'd both www and non-www versions.  Hope that helps!

When you say "people," are you saying your own web team duplicates content to make their job easier? Or am I missing something?...

If that's the case, you really should create unique URL's with unique page titles, product info, etc.  That's the correct way to avoid getting hit for duplicate content - don't create it.  It seems like what you're doing now is more of a band-aid solution to the problem.

I'd consider that even though creating unique content in situations like this can seem daunting and/or be more expensive, there's probably huge long-term gains to made if you do it right.

I've actually seen this happen quite a bit.  I work with a lot of service area businesses who take this same strategy.

I think the pigeon-holing comes into play because of the off-site signals (maybe a bunch of listings with a Dallas address and link to your homepage?)  ...I don't think hcard, schema, etc. do much to keep it from happening.

So what I wind up doing most of the time is optimizing the home-page for their primary high-traffic city, or headquarters.  Unless they're actually trying to rank nationally and it seems possible, it's the way to go.  I've seen huge advantages doing it this way - especially if you have the off-site signals to go with it (which I would guess you do).

So if you had "Dallas, TX Widgets" somewhere in your home-page title, you may wind up ranking well for just "widgets" when searched in the Dallas area.

In my opinion, optimize that homepage for Dallas, then watch and see.  To me, Google already kind of preferring that page is a good sign.

I actually looked at the competitors ranking #3 and #4 for the phrase "download sheet music" since your ranking 5th.  Either way, its not a matter of too much or too little.  It's how much of the link profile is authentic vs how much is made up of stuff like this....

http://www.dionneco.com/2011/02/love-is-a-parallax/

that's what I meant by fake links.

I think what you may be missing is how complex the situation really is.  There's a lot more to be considered than a number in Open Site Explorer - which is actually only a portions of what's really out there.

You may also want to look at changes you can make on-site.  I'm a firm believer that proper HTML, accessibility, UX and all that really matter.

Can't say I've been in that situation, but search engines seem to interpret that tag as an on/off situation.   and I think you probably know that your problems aren't related to or able to be solved by robots meta tags.

You need less fake links.  OSE finds well over half a million links from 3K root domains to your site.  Look at your competitors - a few thousand links from  a handful of domains.

It's a shame because it seems like the internet wanted to make you the authority naturally - You've got a handful of really solid links coming in.  If you could shed the spam somehow you'd be doing a lot better.

So yea, stating the obvious, I know.  best of luck to you and hope the site recovers!

I wouldn't say you've "stuffed keywords" because there's really not enough written copy for them to be stuffed into.I would get a little more detail in those product descriptions. Give them crawlers a little something to sink their teeth into.

The page grader is useful but it's really more of a guideline.  especially when you're optimizing for long-tail phrases like that. Dont' feel like you need an 'A' for that page to do well in search.

Hi Jason,

Check out how the skirmish site's incoming links are anchored.  The majority use the exact keyword "paintball nottingham"....  A natural link profile most of the time that means your anchors are your brand name or actual URL - with just a dash of the keyword related phrases.

and do you know about these? - http://www.skirmish-site.co.uk/venue/paintball-chesterfield/wsdindex.html

Hope that helps

I've seen a lot of un-optimized competitor sites get pushed back to page 2 and taken over by listings in the past couple months.  But, the sites I take care of that don't have dupe content issues, mass spam links, and silly keyword stuffing are doing great!

I don't think engines are favoring anyone....I just think things are evolving, and local business websites need work!  They tend to be crippled with technical issues,  and have over-optimized copy and no real backlinks.  And a lot of businesses are linking to their own Yelp or directory profile from the homepage of their website, sometimes anchored with the keywords they want to rank for.  Lot's of issues going on here.

Hey Tyler, I deal with this same type of thing quite often.  and I'm with you, I wish companies like dex would leave my clients alone.  IMO you are absolutely right,  and I always recommend having 1 single domain - unless there's a darn good reason to do otherwise.

It will hurt traffic/rank to the main domain, or in a best case scenario just be absolutely pointless.  Your client's a local biz - which site will they link to from all their listings, social profiles, and all that?  Let's say someone writes an article about them in a local blog - which site should they link to?  Multiple domains for this type of business will either dilute your SEO efforts or be a waste of resources.  Not to mention be confusing for visitors and install a lack of trust like you were saying.

A website is not inherently an owned asset...you have to own the domain name, the content, etc. for it to actually be valuable to a business.  So you're definitely advising correctly

and yea, that link they sent you has nothing to do with organic search.

If possible, find someone who will meet with you in person and/or speak to you on the phone on a regular basis.  Poor communication and low-quality work seem to go hand in hand.  Some SEO companies have email-only communication policies.  Stuff like that - RED FLAG.  I'd also look out for anyone who stresses the need for "link building" without doing any research into your site/market/competitors.

A lot of people on the SEOmoz recommended list are proven industry-leader types.  No question you'll get the high quality work you're looking for and more.

Hey Bo, just thought I'd chime in here.  I had a client's site get some kind of nasty code injection - pharma stuff like you're talking about.  Happened a month or so ago.  He was #1 for his keyphrase also, but as soon as the site was compromised, he dropped to page 4-5.  Soon as I re-did the site and got it live his rankings came back.

Sooo...bad news and good news.  I highly doubt your site is actually de-indexed (good news).  The bad news is the amount of work you'll have to do.  I completely wiped the root folder, deleted the DB, and re-built the wordpress site from scratch on a different theme/framework.

Yikes!, I don't even wanna know what the exact role of fiverr was here, can't be pretty.

and you're right the fear of penguin/fear of losing revenue is what's needed. Cause business owners want to make money obviously, they see a competitor with a gazillion automated spam links ranking better, and it's like - "let's do that!"

If you can effectively explain the long-term risk that poses to the bottom line, they pull a complete 180.  To "do that" would mean to invest in the exact "strategies" google is trying to devalue, risk being deindexed and losing you're only owned digital asset, and negatively represent your business across the web, all for a fractional temporary gain.

Nice Work!  and really neat what you guys are offering to the food-truck niche.  Smart.

I wouldn't worry about consistency with unstructured citations (loose mentions of your company), because it can be hard to ensure anyway.  You want to make sure your "structured citations" are consistent.  So your directory listings basically - places, yahoo, etc.  This is what you definitely want to match up with your NAP.and I would def use the correct schema.org markup. which makes it easier for crawlers to understand your structured data. Hope this helps you out!

I'm sure there's a ton of people in this community running Wordpress, any Genesis developers/users out there?

For anybody who doesn't know, Genesis is a parent framework for building wordpress child themes.  It saves a ton of time for people that aren't too handy w/ php (like me).

I'm working on a few sites locally with it right now, and it's really impressive.  I'm seriously never planning on using another WP framework.  It also integrates perfectly with Yoast SEO, which is something not all frameworks do.

So I thought I'd try to get some input from the community here, anybody have another framework they like? Or have an opinion on the SEO benefit of genesis?  Would love to hear...

Hi Houses, and your GA code is probably fine.  It's javascript, so nothing wrong with it being before closing body.  I actually don't even think it matters as much with the asynchronous tracking codes.

and my first reaction to this read was the same as EGOL's.  Permalinks changed, old ones didn't get redirected. This is essentially like starting over (for those pages, not entire domain), if it's a new url, it's a new page to search engines.

and just so you know, most CMS' make it darn easy to implement redirects, or usually your hosting account will have some kind 301 tool.  It's literally as easy as typing the old url, the one that replaced it, then clicking "ok".

Hi, and congrats on publishing consistently, with other business responsibilities, etc,, that alone can be a victory.  In terms of author rank (which I am no expert on) this article offers some great suggestions: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2253968/How-to-Start-Building-Your-Author-Rank-6-Best-Practices

I honestly wouldn't stress on specifics, but would look at overall G+ and social engagment.  Try to take a "cover all best practices approach" and do the research, watch analytics to gauge which posts/topics are best received, all that kind of stuff.  Best of luck and hope that helps!

Thanks for chiming in.  and this is more than a difference in quality of work we're talking about. One of 2 things is going on in these situations: honest business owners are being conned, or these SEO companies really are that incompetent.  I have trouble believing it's the latter.

Let's say I took my car into a mechanic.  He tells me I need a new transmission, blah blah - charges me 5K, and I pay it.  Then he doesn't touch my car, parks it out back for a week, and calls me back saying his guys worked extra hard, I only owe 1K more, but everything is golden.  This is criminal, and it's exactly what's happening in our industry.

Ok, I'm not gonna put anyone on blast by name, but this imgur album outta give you a better idea of the kind of nonsense we're talking about here...

wait...or did I just stumble upon the hottest new SEO secret?  Time to add some "Google pages" to my clients sites.  Ay yay yay....

iuRm3

Glad to have an oracle drop in here, thanks.  and yea..dangerous is right.  I don't know much about general PR but I'm always trying to stress the fact that those types of link building methods aren't only useless, but create massive risk.

Thank you Nick, you make some really great points.  I may complain, but ultimately it just means there's a huge opportunity to provide value, which is great for guys like us. I'm not exactly having trouble finding work these days.

It' just really too bad that business owners have had it drilled into their heads that enough links pointing to their site with the right anchor text = serp domination.  I've even heard the retort from these SEO goons - "well, if that wasn't true, why does Adobe reader rank so well for "download now"?...too funny.

I think you're right, in the long run the truth will prevail, and business owners stop getting royally ripped off.  Have good weekend Nick!

This may not be the most productive Q&A discussion, but I've had some really interesting experiences this last month that have made me even more distrusting of "SEO" companies.

I can't help but think of this post (not much has changed since '09).  Even though it takes a pretty extreme stance, I agree with the core of it -

_"The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work, and it’s poisoning the web."   _

I didn't start doing this type of work wanting to have such a negative opinion of SEO companies, but I just keep having the same experience:

I'll get referred to someone who isnt' happy with their SEO company.  They send me their web address, I check out the site, and seriously can't believe what I find.

MISSING PAGE TITLES, EVERY CANONICAL URL ISSUE IMAGINABLE, AND 10'S OF THOUSANDS OF BOT SPAM EMAT LINKS FROM PAGES LIKE THIS...AND THIS

and just recently a company a called one of my clients and conned him into paying for this piece of spam garbage, obviously scraped from the site that I made for him. 

and what's worse, sometimes for whatever reason these companies will have all the client's FTP and CMS logins and it can be hell trying to get them to hand them over.  There's no webmaster tools set up, no analytics, nothing....

These businesses are paying a good chunk of change every month, I just can't believe stuff like this is so common...well acutally, it's what i've come to expect this point.  But I used to think most SEO companies actually had their clients best interest at heart.

Does every honest consultant out there run into this same type of stuff constantly? How common is this type of stuff really?

Now, on to the positive.  This community rocks, and I feel like it represents real, ethical, solution-oriented, boundary-less SEO.  So thank you Mozzers for all you do.  and I love using the tools here to help businesses understand why they need an honest person helping them.

If anyone has thoughts on the topic, I'd love to hear 'em...

I would go after a synonym or some long-tail terms.  If your home page targets "example apartments," you could target a phrase like "model apartments" or "types of apartments" - and of course do a little research into search volumes and related keywords.

Hi Scott - does the url on your places listing point to the same page that dropped out of the organic serps?  This is pretty normal, Google just doesn't give an organic and local spot to the same page of a website.  But the authority of that page is still helping you earn your places rank.

For phrases that have any competition at all, it's nearly impossible to appear in the local pack with an address that doesn't correspond to the city of search.  It's just kind of the way local works.

It's not something you'll be penalized for, but you may find it naturally harder to build value for a second site.  Which one do you list on your business/directory/social profiles?  Which one would you refer customers to? or tell someone else to link to you with?  It's easy to wind up diluting your efforts.  Not saying you shouldn't do it, but just make sure you're confident it's worth your while, and obviously rewrite content and you should be fine.

Do you think it would be easier to optimize a structure where your main categories where specific types of products, and not a characteristic that multiple types of products have (high definition)?  So organize it by cameras: - HD - other - other.  recorders: - HD - other -other.  I don't really know enough about what you do, but it just seems like there'd be a more efficient way for you to organize it.

If you're concerned about sub-categories cannibalizing your main category you could always no-index them. And breadcrumbs would useful in respect to the interlinking as well - so every sub category will be linked to parent automatically.  I think if you do that and nail the category structure and navigation, then you'll have a solid internal link structure already.   Hope this helps!

I would assume it's a combination of what you mentioned, how long that listing page has existed, and how well it's linked to internally.

I am surprised what OSE doesn't pick up sometimes, but it's still the best thing out there for competitor analysis.  I'm sure it will continue to improve and it may very well pick up those links in the future.

Out of the 4 sites I help that have BBB listings not a one shows in OSE.  And the listings have existed for years.  Google Webmaster Tools shows them though, so assume they're not going unnoticed by Google.

Did you look at the anchor text distribution in open site explorer and compare yours to your competitors?  and is the phrase you want to rank for "japanese cooking lessons"?

After a quick look I would say that since a lot of the links to your home page are anchored with your name and also no-follow, you just haven't built enough authority to rank where you want for the more general terms.

If you want people to find you for more local searches "Japanese cooking classes London" and those types, then I would try putting word London somewhere in your home page's title tag and see what happens. More customized title tags across the whole site would probably help you out too.

but i did about 7 mins of investigation, so take it with a grain of salt.

Your site's really nice by the way and congrats on the book!

Honestly it would be very hard to tell just based on that screenshot.  Links are a quality over quantity thing so the numbers alone won't tell us much.  By errors do you mean on-site errors? - duplicate content, missing metainfo, etc.  Getting those taken care of should be a prerequisite, so sounds like your on the right track.

If you want to tell us the domains I might be able to be more helpful....Best of Luck!

At first glance I would not be worried about it.  I tend to think those types of links won't hurt unless they're extremely excessive/abusive.. else negative SEO could really get out of hand.  And you're website has some very strong relevant links pointing to it already.

Yea, you can search around and find little niche sites and blog listing sites that relate to cars.  But the general directories will all have categories for auto body repair or something similar.  So for any local services business I'd grab listings like places, yahoo, hotfrog, manta, kudzu, mojopages...the list is never-ending really so you can kind of use your own discretion in determining what directories are more relevant.  Did you see the local directories? Pretty much all of these will have categories for your type of business.

Another tool I've had success with is the Local Citation Finder by Whitespark.  It finds relevant citations based local search terms and does other nifty stuff.

I thought this was happening to me too when I first signed up.  If you are trying to use the page grader from "within the campaign" it will only update weekly after the initial grade.

What you do is click research tools in the very top navigation, then go to the page grader from there.  It should look identical but it lets you run reports against any keywords, not just ones from your campaign...from here your grades will update instantly, and you'll have an option to add it to your weekly on-page reports.  Hope that helps!

Hi James, don't worry everyone's gotta start somewhere.  This is normal if you 've just had a brand new site built.  You want links from other domains, and the best kind of links aren't the kind that you have any control over (someone links to you naturally because the content is useful). This stuff takes time

You may want to start by submitting to some reputable directories related to your niche.  Check out SEOmoz's directory list.

...oh and btw, open site explorer gives some great insight, but it's not as accurate as your own Google webmaster tools.

You are definitely approaching it right.  Like you said, there has to be something in it for them. It seems like a good idea to me, but also seems like some serious work.  Getting 'em designed, printed could get pricey...and since it's not digital, how would you modify the bakery listings as time goes on to reflect which bakeries link and which ones don't?  Seems like you'd almost need a monthly publication...it's a tough one.  If you can somehow digitize this idea I think it'll be a lot easier for you.

Yea, those types of links are usually no-follow.  As far as no-follow links being helpful for rankings - that's something that's been debated thoroughly and it's hard to say.  Like you said, they don't pass much juice, but can possibly be seen as a relevance signal.

I would also expect links from sites related to your niche to be of more value than social profile links.

Canonical URL's are two url's that point to the exact same webpage.

It's not a link that users can click on or anything.  It's like an invisible note to search engines that tells them there are other URL's on your website that point to the same page.  It keeps search engines from getting confused.

I believe google page service is still in beta and on an approval-only basis.  Looks useful and I've seen claims that it's shaved 1-2 secs of load times.

You really don't need to do anything, this is totally normal.  One of them is showing metrics for the specific page (your home page) and the other is metrics for your domain overall.

It's totally normally for the PA of the homepage to be higher than the DA...

If you receive a warning in Google Webmaster tools, that's seen as a manual penalty.  If you lose rank for a few keyword terms it might be an "algorithmic" penalty - which just means that Google no likey.  These types of penalties are difficult to assess.

Usually key phrases would be penalized because of unnatural patterns in anchor text.  I would look at your anchor text distribution in open site explorer and see what you've got going on.

Yea sorry, I can explain a little better.  The style.css in a wordpress theme will usually have theme developer information. Yours looks like this:

Theme Name: NewspaperTimes [SinglePro Version]
Theme URI: http://magazine3.com
Description: Newspaper/Political Wordpress Magazine Theme
Version: 4.1
Author: Magazine3
Author URI: [http://magazine3.com](http://magazine3.com/)

If you purchased it from them then you should be entitle to some sort of support.

And as for the firefox developer tools you're inspecting the CSS and HTML, there's a lot
involved in making the changes you want to make.  You'd need to be comfortable with
those as well as PHP to dynamically load in featured images and excerpts.

There's two sides to SEO.  Primarily, like you said it should be making improvements that help search engines properly crawl and idex the site.  On-page SEO is easy in sense, because the best practices are well established.

Off page SEO is where everything gets shady, way too many SEO companies automating link building, dummy sites with all scraped content, article spinners, the list goes on....
I just fixed up a site that an SEO company had been "building links" for over the last year.  The site didn't have keywords in the title tags, had tons of duplicate url issues, repeated content all over the place, etc.  Stuff like that just blows my mind, seen it quite a bit.Good SEO should be a solution based on what a client actually needs.  Most of the time they won't know, so it's on us to do our research and find out.  We need to research the niche, the competition, the whole 9 if we wanna actually provide value.

Well, the name of your theme folder is "newpaper times single pro."   Search returns pretty much all torrent and spam sites.  So theme support is probably nonexistent.  However, I think you have enough of the word Gattwick as it is.

Theme developers normally provide direct support for the themes they sell.  So it really depends who you purchased your theme from.

If you bought it directly from a vendor like woothemes, themify, etc., then you will definitely find support options on the website where you made the purchase.

If you bought your theme from a marketplace like themeforest.com, then you'd need to log back in and look for the developer or theme author - they will have some sort of theme support option through they're author profile.  If they don't, then they're probably not the most reputable vendor.

Also many SEO improvements won't be theme-dependent and are easy to make with the help of plugins like YoastSEO or All in One SEO pack.

What kinds of things are you trying to do? I may be able to point you in the right direction...

All of our websites are wordpress sites hosted by BlueHost, and I've been completely satisfied.  They are however lower traffic sites (30-100) visitors per day. When I called them I think I talked to someone in Utah and the support was great.

If I were in the market for new hosting right now I'd probably be looking into Media Temple.

I also believe it's absolutely useful, ODP data still gets aggregated by smaller search engines, other directories, etc...but like Robert said it's not gaurunteed, pay close attention to make sure you choose the most appropriate category and the listing description/title is quality for the best chances.

Good luck!

Hi PJ,  to make sure the sitemap actually gets crawled, its a good idea to have it linked.  This way search crawlers hit that link and then the sitemap - which obviously has links to all pages,  categories, etc. as well as info about how important pages are and how often they change.

The point is just to make sure your pages and images get properly indexed - you can also submit xml sitempaps and check up on indexing in google webmaster tools.